E-Commerce Retailers – Active In Social Media But Lacking Mobile Video and HTML5

Some retailers are more active in social media than you might imagine. A full 12% of them have more than one million fans. Brands in that category include Victoria’s Secret, Kohl’s, Nike, Target, Walmart and Best Buy). Over 50% have over 100,000 fans. I wish I knew how they were doing it.

It seems like video is certainly helping them along. When a video is posted to one of their walls hundreds and even thousands of people comment and like the video. That in turn expands,socially to tens of thousands of impressions. In the graphs below, the left is uploaded by the Brand while on the right is uploaded by their fans. SundaySky stated that Target and Nike are leading in fan-uploaded videos with 58 and 57 but that most were spam.

On the mobile side, they found that mobile video is still young and hasn’t seen a lot of uptake by major brands. Most mobile sites don’t have videos on them, there have been few HTML5 deployments for mobile, which means most won’t play on the iOS devices and regular versions don’t play well on most mobile devices.

Their overall findings are that many retailers aren’t taking proper advantage of online video, mobile video or social networking. While some are showing amazing success, others are not. The importance of video SEO was highlighted by the recent changes at Yahoo, who started using Bing as their search engine. Sites like NewEgg that formerly had thousands of videos indexed at Yahoo now only have dozens.

Of the retailers with ecommerce that are using video Amazon and Overstock are far more advanced with over 200,000 and 160,000 videos each.Then there’s a massive drop off to two that have around 20-30,000 and the top ten drop as low as 3,400 videos. In regards to Google indexed videos Amazon is the leader with around 224,000 videos indexed. Overstock.com isn’t quite doing as well of a job with only about 56,000 or 30% of their videos indexed. HSN is doing something completely right as they’ve got 100% of their videos indexed by Google as does Amazon. They also happen to be the number one retailer with a YouTube presence with the largest number of videos. Each video has a link to the matching product page, hence YouTube is not only used for brand promotion, but also to drive traffic back to the website. They are also number 2 on Facebook.